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by Jeff Rowe - Contributing EditorEach MCAD Weekly Review delivers to its readers news concerning the latest developments in the MCAD industry, MCAD product and company news, featured downloads, customer wins, and coming events, along with a selection of other articles that we feel you might find interesting. Brought to you by MCADCafe.com. If we miss a story or subject that you feel deserves to be included, or you just want to suggest a future topic, please contact us! Questions? Feedback? Click here. Thank you!

Autodesk announced that Autodesk Inventor software has extended its leadership status as the best selling 3D mechanical design software for the fifth consecutive year. It exceeded the licensed seat counts of all other competing 3D design software applications. Autodesk Inventor software continues adoption by designers and engineering teams looking to leverage their expertise with AutoCAD software while taking advantage of the 3D modeling and functional design capabilities found in Autodesk Inventor. The company said there are many reasons why Autodesk Inventor continues to be the best selling 3D mechanical design software, including:

It is designed to fully utilize both 2D drawings and 3D modeling capabilities in an easy and intuitive design environment, making it the best choice for AutoCAD users

It is the only software application to provide leading-edge functional design capabilities so that customers can create design based on the functional requirements of a product before they commit to complex model geometry

It delivers built-in, easy-to-implement data management tools

It institutes disciplined methods for sharing design data across the manufacturing process.

Museums and history buffs have begun using SolidWorks for a new application - breathing life into centuries past. "Industrial archeology" is the study and re-creation of machines, parts, vehicles, and buildings that may have vanished, been destroyed, gone obsolete, or perhaps never existed at all. The practice combines art, history, craftsmanship, and, in a new twist, computer-aided design. Industrial archeologists like William L. Gould use SolidWorks software as an efficient, mechanically faithful way to illustrate, in 3D and myriad individual components, a piece of lost history. For example, his full-color 3D CAD model of the 1879 Mason Bogie, a steam locomotive rendered in

SolidWorks and PhotoWorks software, exists as a 3D CAD model with hundreds of discrete parts. It is available as a fine art lithographic print or a set of plans in exacting detail. He will tackle other industrial archeology projects in hopes of supplying documentation service and animations to museum curators and exhibit designers. His dream, however, is a "virtual museum," that is, an online museum filled with historically accurate cyber models and faithful recreations of artifacts that no longer exist.

Jeffrey Rowe is the editor and publisher of MCADCafé and MCAD Weekly Review. He can be reached